


Who Are We to Turn Each Other's Heads?

by nonisland



Category: Troy (2004)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Bittersweet, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Foreshadowing, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Wartime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23442766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: Hector cannot bear to let Helen die for Troy without having any claim on it, and Andromache finds she understands better than he thinks.
Relationships: Andromache/Hector (Troy 2004), Andromache/Hector/Helen (Troy 2004)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: nonisland's assorted Helen of Troy feelings





	Who Are We to Turn Each Other's Heads?

**Author's Note:**

> **Content notices:** Non-detailed references to canonical domestic abuse; rather more explicit references to canonical war/adultery/objectification/etc.
> 
> I started this in, no joke, 2014. Title from Ellie Goulding’s “[This Love (Will Be Your Downfall)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq4WRF6IZI0)”.
> 
> * * *

“I’m sorry,” Hector breathes, in the darkness of their bedroom.

The sound of it draws Andromache fully awake, sends fear racing through her blood. Hector slips back into bed at her side and she runs frantic hands over him: limbs whole, hands clean, heart steady if too-quick beneath her hands. “Why?” she asks. “What have you done?”

He lets out a long, shaking breath. “I have killed Troy,” he says. The words sound bitter in his mouth, fall strangely against her ears. “I have done almost what Paris did.”

Helen of Sparta is a beautiful woman—more than beautiful, inhumanly lovely, fair and cruel as the sun. Andromache feels dull and plain, suddenly, at her husband’s side. Her skin where it touches his is sticky with sweat, dusty, flawed. Helen is perfection. Is it even possible to look at her and not want her, even just once, even if only for the space of a few heartbeats? Andromache doesn’t know. She wishes she did.

“What did you do?” she asks. It is foolish to love her husband as selfishly as she does, maybe, but he has never tired of her before.

“I wish I could have let her do it,” Hector says. The words trail into the darkness and are lost. Andromache’s heart catches painfully in her throat; she tightens her hands into fists at her sides and lets the bite of her nails against her palms take her away from this, from the quiet, lost sound of his voice. “I found her in the gardens, trying—she would have turned herself over to her husband’s army to stop this. To save us. Andromache, forgive me, I couldn’t let her go.”

Andromache’s hands uncurl, slowly, warily.

“I told her she was Troy’s,” Hector says, “I told her Troy would defend her. I could not bear to watch her choose a fate she’d been fighting. I had tried—you know I tried—to make my father send her back, but I…”

“It was different,” Andromache whispers, “watching her send herself back.” She doesn’t know what she would have done, if it had been her in the gardens with Helen—beautiful Helen, irresistible Helen, Helen who looks everywhere around her and never drinks to drunkenness and clings to Paris like a broken spar in a shipwreck—Helen whose callousness is brazen armor over a fear none of the men have ever had to know, whose beauty shines like a kingdom’s worth of gold. She already knows she can’t hate Helen, as she should. She could easily have done the same thing as Hector has done.

“Yes.” Hector turns her face into his neck, rests his cheek against the crown of her head, and she breathes salt and smoke and the faintest trace of foreign perfume.

“What else?” she asks against his skin, still afraid, still thinking it’s better to know.

He is silent for a long moment, and Andromache has time to think perhaps it isn’t better to know, or perhaps it would have been better if she’d never asked. She never wanted to know that her husband as much as any other husband of Troy would go, sometimes, to other lovers’ beds, and never tell her of it, because it didn’t matter to him, because she didn’t matter to him. She thinks she could bear anything, if he would only be the one to tell her.

“I didn’t,” he says finally, and some of the worry unspools within Andromache, and then he adds, softer, “I wanted to,” and the rest of it is gone too; she’s somehow at peace, even knowing her husband desires another woman, even knowing he held her close enough that her perfume still clings to his skin.

“Of course you wanted to,” Andromache says. It’s gentler than she means it to be. “Everyone does. But you didn’t.”

Hector’s arms tighten around her. “You wouldn’t have wanted me to,” he says, as simply as if that’s enough all in itself. Andromache sinks into the warmth of his embrace, feels contentment welling up inside her like sunlight in winter: quiet, soft, necessary.

Even in the darkness, even with her face hidden against the solid heat of his shoulder, it’s a struggle for Andromache to say, “If you ever—if you do go to some other woman’s bed, or anyone’s, if you tell me…” She has no right to ask about even a woman’s, let alone a man’s, but she still wishes she did.

He is very still, suddenly. “If I tell you?”

It’s foolishness. Andromache feels her face heat in shame. “Never mind.”

“Andromache,” he says, stroking her hair, her jaw, curving his fingers around her chin to bring her face away from his throat. “What is it?”

“I don’t want you to shut me away in this either,” she says, too loud, too quick. She’ll wake Scamandrius’s nurse if she isn’t careful. “I would want to know, if you went to someone else. That’s all.”

Hector’s hands are warm against her face, his fingers separate paths of heat. Too much, suddenly. She pulls away and he lets her go. He is an outline, a shadow against shadows, still and patient, and she wishes she could see his face.

“There hasn’t been anyone else,” he says, and then shakes his head with a rueful breath of a laugh. “Not until tonight. I didn’t care about her when she was only beautiful.”

“I know,” Andromache says. They’re too far apart; she is afraid again. She settles back against him, skin to skin, heart to heart, and breathes easier.

“She would have died to save Troy,” Hector says, “and never tried to claim even a speck of dust in its streets.”

Something twists, sharp and sweet and painful, in Andromache’s chest. “I know,” she whispers. “I know.”

“If I had gone to her…I think she would have let me.”

Andromache thinks on it, turns the possibility over in her mind. She cannot imagine anyone choosing Paris over Hector, given the choice. “I would have,” she says, and then realizes what she said, what else it could mean—what she knows it does mean.

She waits for regret, or fear.

Instead she says, “I would have,” again, and her voice is steadier. “I would have let you if I were Helen, and I would have let you if I—if I weren’t. I would let you, if you only tell me after.”

Hector sighs, and his breath stirs her hair. “I don’t want to dishonor you like that.” After a moment, he adds, “Or Paris.”

“Paris,” Andromache scoffs. Paris has no claim on Helen, for all his boyish pride might think he does. He took her from her husband, however urgently she needed to be taken; if she finds another protector now, that is hardly Paris’s to deny.

“He is my brother.” Hector might be smiling, from his voice; his fingers are warm against her shoulder. “And you are my wife.”

Andromache wets her lips. “She is beautiful, though. And brave.”

There is a silence so profound she can hear the beat of her own heart. It runs faster and faster as time stretches out around their bed.

“Andromache,” Hector says finally, sounding lost, and then nothing. After another drawn-out moment he asks, “Do you want her too?”

And after all that it is surprisingly easy for Andromache to say, “Yes,” to think again of Helen’s dazzling impossible beauty without fear of what it means for her, Andromache. She would like to touch, not to smudge Helen’s fairness with her own too-human fingers but in gentleness, to give pleasure as well as taking it. She doubts many people have given to Helen.

Hector would, if Helen wanted him.

It is not why Andromache loves him, but it is part of the same things that do make him the man she loves: the care he takes of his people; his willingness to listen. She is so lucky to have him as husband, she cannot begrudge him the use of his own eyes, or the stirrings of his heart.

“You could,” Hector says softly. “I would keep you from nothing that does not shame my father.”

“I’m not what she needs,” Andromache tells him. “I can’t protect her. I can do nothing for her. Paris is infatuated, and a woman like her wouldn’t dare threaten that for anything I could offer.”

“You have so much to offer.” Hector’s hand smooths down her spine—not to arouse, only to touch—and settles in the dip at the small of her back, holding her closer to him. “Good counsel, comfort, joy. What do you mean, ‘a woman like her’?”

Andromache closes her eyes against the darkness, and breathes: sweat and smoke, and Helen’s perfume, fading between them. Hector’s skin is warm, his pulse steady despite its pace. “Alone and afraid.”

Hector’s hand tightens against her. “I know.”

“I wish you had,” Andromache says against his throat. “I wish you had kissed her, if she wanted you to. I wish…”

“I wish I could have brought her back here.” Hector rolls over and pulls her with him, so she is looking down at him amid the shadows, her hair falling around them both. “Not to our bed, but to you.”

Andromache could pull away if she hated the thought, more easily here than as they’d been lying. She bends to kiss him, and says, “It’s too real.”

Even she isn’t quite sure what she means by that. Helen is real; that’s what so fiercely struck Hector tonight; that’s what Andromache had spent weeks trying to ignore.

“Somewhere else, then,” Hector says between kisses. His mouth is no less urgent than hers. “A different garden, in sunlight, where you waited.”

Andromache’s eyes burn. She squeezes them closed to keep any tears that form from falling and giving her away. “Somewhere safe,” she whispers, and her voice is steady enough for that. “There’s nowhere like that in Troy now.” Her hands grip his shoulders so tight—too tight just to keep her balance—that it must hurt him, but he gives no sign of it.

There’s nowhere safe in Troy because of Helen.

Hector says, “I know,” and kisses Andromache again: her mouth, her jaw, the salt from her eyes. She had thought he hadn’t known she was weeping. He doesn’t say he wishes that place were real; that’s too much for either of them.

“If she wanted you to,” Andromache says again, because she has to, because so many people have wanted Helen and so few of them have cared for her at all. “If she wanted us.”

“Oh, Andromache.” Hector’s voice is so soft in the darkness that it’s a caress itself against her skin. “My wife, my queen. My love.”

Andromache presses her face against his throat, feeling his beard rough against her mouth as she speaks. “I want to see her laugh. I want…” She is not ashamed of what else she wants, but it feels like theft to speak it without Helen’s knowledge.

She could say, _I want to touch her and taste her, I want to see you on your knees before her, I want to see her so shattered by pleasure she forgets to be afraid and doesn’t need to be beautiful._ She could move their hands on her own body, or his. She could, but she doesn’t want to; she wants to hold and be held, and dream of somewhere where _all_ of them can forget to be afraid.

As if he understands even this, Hector says only, “I do too.”

“This garden where you would bring her,” Andromache says. “Sunlit and safe.”

“Full of green things,” he whispers. “And songbirds, and flowers.” His heartbeat is slowing again, steady against her as he’s always been.

Andromache sighs and feels her eyelids growing heavy, all the tension of the past moments draining away and leaving her spent. The gates of dreams swing open before her; she prays this garden comes to them through the gates of horn. “You should,” she murmurs.

He never will, of course. They both know the gods are not that merciful. But Hector gives Andromache the same promises he must have given Helen, and she lets herself fall into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The gates of horn and ivory were the gates through which dreams went; the gates of horn kept true dreams, and the gates of ivory illusions. It’s referenced in the _Odyssey_ , but that’s close enough.


End file.
